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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

Tim has lots of experience in business and tech. From scratch he built a self driving car company valued at $3.2 billion, whose autonomous OS is outperforming efforts from major automakers and tech companies and with a fraction of the resources. Zoox has gotten to where they are now on about $300 million. Others have spent far more and have a lot less to show for it.

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Your comment history suggests that you have some relationship with Zoox that you're not disclosing.

You've commented on Zoox several times before in an overly enthusiastic manner. You've also commented several times before on autonomy and your comments have been called out for astroturfing in a couple of instances.

Readers please beware and take this comment with a grain of salt.

I've been accused of working for Waymo and Cruise too, because I defend them against the unfounded bullshit you guys spread about them. And about me, too, apparently. I'm a self driving car nerd, I moderate a subreddit dedicated to the subject under the same username I have here, and I've been following the industry, the technology and it's players since the DARPA days. Relative to the rest of the industry Zoox is doing incredibly well, so if you want to challenge me about something, how about instead of making up teleological conspiracy theories, challenge me on the facts.

I'm interested in the facts of what they're doing so well - do they have deployed systems taking passenger rides? This is/was my industry, so I'm not just asking idly.

As an aside, the lack of clarity about who you do work for is probably what's contributing to the "teleological conspiracy theories".

Zoox did several years of closed course testing and started on public roads in San Fransisco about 1 year ago with just 10 cars. Last fall they did a press event and took a few dozen journalists around for rides and everyone had good things to say about the performance of their vehicles. Their first set of disengagement reports for 2017 had them at 1 every 430 miles, which is worse than Waymo or Cruise, but way ahead of everyone else, and especially impressive given how few test miles they had racked up at the time. It lends credibility to the claims some have made that Jesse Levinson is the brightest guy in the industry.

Ashley Vance for Bloomberg did a big puff piece on Zoox a month ago, the video is pretty interesting, it's the first we've been able to see of their prototypes in action, and I had been waiting years to see if they were actually following through with their original vision:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-07-17/zoox-and-it...

A couple days ago some pics of an unidentified av test vehicle was spotted, and one of the smart guys in my subreddit called it out as a zooxmobile with an new sensor configuration arranged to match the configuration of their protoypes:

https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2018/08/21/unidentifi...

Rock on, dude. Eff the haters. People love to make claims like above or downvote as soon as a positive comment is posted on something they don’t like or someone else comes to their enemies defense.

So... Are you in any relationships with them?

I know a programmer who worked for BioWare in my home city who has been with Zoox for about a year. I met him once, years before he left for SF, because we have a mutual ex-girlfriend. So yeah, I'm right up in there.

Hey, as someone who is just observing this and doesn't have a dog in the fight -- thanks. (I am assuming that -- although you didn't say it -- this is a full disclosure of ALL your conflicts of interest.)

I am not quite sure what I believe about when it is appropriate to accuse someone of having undisclosed conflicts of interest. But I am certain that the best way to respond to such an accusation is with a full disclosure of all conflicts of interest. Regardless of whether the accusation was appropriate, the disclosure ends the issue. And conflicts of interest (to one degree or another) are perfectly normal and do not invalidate a person's opinions or eliminate them as a useful contributor to the discussion.

Here we go. Gotcha! Mutual interest

Accusing someone of astroturfing (or in your case, merely suggesting it) undermines the integrity of online discussion. It has a chilling effect on perspectives that may be viewed as controversial.

Just because someone is enthusiastic doesn’t mean they’re a shill. Even if you’re ultimately correct you shouldn’t wield that accusation without exceptional evidence - being an apologist for a company is not exceptional evidence. Cynicism has a place but you can’t just use it like a blunt instrument.

Fair - and feedback noted. I would have chosen different words but I don't regret delivering the message of caution.

The author chose phrasing that seemed to carry an authoritative tone and it begged questioning into the author's background/history.

Valued at 3.2B USD, by investors who have just fired him...

It's a sign of how crazy things are when 300M USD can be considered a small amount of money to spend on technology development (particularly for a product that doesn't actually require anything inherently very-very expensive, aside from staffing costs).

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